Building culture: Urban change and collective memory in the new Berlin (Germany)

The falling of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, led to dramatic shifts in the social and urban fabric of Berlin. While the residents of East Berlin may have entered new political terrain, they were planted firmly on old geographical terrain. This land was permeated with its past—constructed and contested, in the form of official collective memory—in both visible and invisible ways. Using the case of eastern Berlin between 1988 and 1998, this dissertation examines the effects of the falling of the Berlin Wall on the memorialization of resistance to and persecution by the Nazi regime. The dissertation finds that major political and economic change do not directly result in equally exhaustive changes in the cultural practice of memorialization. Given the truly dramatic rise in property values and the fantastic opportunities for real estate-based profit presented in the early 1990s, an overall decrease in the amount of land devoted to such memorials might be expected. Yet the research presented here indicates that in eastern Berlin exactly the opposite has occurred. Not only do all pre-1989 sites memorializing resistance to and persecution by the Nazi regime remain in place, but additional land is designated for new memorial sites. Throughout the 1990s vacant lots and nearly-forgotten buildings are transformed into places of powerful and wide-ranging collective memory and symbolism. The dissertation demonstrates that this moral project of remembering renders patches of urban land commercially unusable, but within certain material, economic, and political limits. Furthermore, collective memory has material consequences, and arises from a mixture of quiet consensus and passionate public dispute. These effects of memory act in conjunction with the real estate market and shifts in urban planning to shape the constellation of buildings and meanings in post-1989 Berlin. The moral imperative to mark these acts of resistance and persecution in the landscape has a small, but not unimportant, effect on the urban landscape of a united Berlin. Remembering can, and does, leave its marks on the skin of the city.